Op-ed: Telling Our Stories Makes a Difference

This was a film that needed to be made, and it needed to be made by someone who’d lived through it.

BY David Weissman

December 01 2011 6:24 PM ET

Even though AIDS has dramatically retreated from our conversations and consciousness since powerful medications began to stem the tide of death, it continues to haunt our community — and so many others around the world. Whether we are engaging in completely safe sexual practices or willfully barebacking, gay men’s sexuality can’t escape the shadow of AIDS. Those who are still getting infected find themselves facing a lifetime of toxic medications, which are often only affordable via tenuous government funding. Many forget that AIDS is just as deadly as it ever was for those who can’t access treatment.

At almost every Q&A I’ve done for the film, I’ve been asked about the prevalence of barebacking, particularly among younger men. The question is generally asked by men of an older generation, many of whom feel an unspoken rage that anyone could be so cavalier about continuing to perpetuate this plague. It is only willful barebacking that has kept this epidemic alive among gay men. Whatever complexities contribute to that reality, it is a truth that must be addressed. Many of those who fought, suffered, and survived those years take it very personally — understandably — when others don’t feel any responsibility to participate in the elimination of this plague.

The messages supporting prevention that come out of We Were Here are not delivered so much through the tragic images of men covered in purple Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions or the ravaged bodies of other AIDS sufferers, but through the inspiring history of a community responding to calamity with extraordinary courage, compassion, and political determination.

In conversation, in their eloquent Facebook posts, in articles that they’ve written, younger gay men who have seen We Were Here have told me they are overwhelmed by the realization of what prior generations have had to endure, by the sacrifices made to get us to where we are today. They say that for the first time, they are able to viscerally imagine what it must have been like in the early years, when we watched friends and lovers die terrible deaths, in droves.

My hope is that We Were Here will help engender a complex understanding of what AIDS has meant to our community. I hope that the generations that managed to survive the worst of it will find validation and catharsis in having this story told. And I hope that it provides an avenue for intergenerational conversation, for inspiration, and for a renewed sense of pride in who we are, where're we've been, and where we can still go.

David Weissman is director of We Were Here, which will be available on pay-per-view and on-demand services nationwide beginning December 9. Weissman moved to San Francisco, where he continues to live, in 1976. He previously codirected (with Bill Weber) the widely acclaimed documentary The Cockettes.